A character defect of mine is this stubborn obstacle in my brain that says that everything I put to paper has to be GOOD or at least in some way live up to a mostly imaginary standard that I have achieved before. This is the sort of thing that leads to a post about the end of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 primary campaign sitting unpublished in draft form for four months because I don’t think it has quite yet managed to say everything I think it should say in the exact right way, while also explaining something about THE WORLD or THIS MOMENT that I think has gone unnoticed or unsaid. It’s the sort of thing that lands me in two hours of work on a stupid bad photoshop joke that no one but myself will notice or understand, anyway, which in turn leads to avoidance of blogging because I know that if I blog, I will want a funny image at the top, and I don’t want to take—or don’t have—the time to make it happen. The real self-censorship is my own self-aggrandized expectations. The real chilling effect has its provenance in a distinct overestimation of the value of my words, past and future.

All of which is perfectly exemplified in even the above paragraph, an entirely unnecessary preambulatory nothing that certainly has no place atop a morning news jog. But I haven’t been here in a while, and, as established elsewhere, whenever I come back from having been away, I feel the need to justify it—both the absence and the return. I want to write again. I think about it every day, but mostly avoid it, because it is terrible. And there’s plenty else to do, after all. I think about the stupid daily newsblogging bullshit that will become more frequent here; the bigger, THINKIER, heavier bullshit that will sprout from that first stuff every few weeks, if I’m lucky; the storytelling that happens glacially in my word processor, one deleted sentence at a time, chunks constantly falling off into the warming ocean.

So here we are. I will use this spaaaace, under the “Morning Press” category tag, to post links to articles I find interesting or noteworthy, and to make brief, hopefully worthy, notes about them. This will also serve as good prep for the weekly podcast, or at least as a topic repository for when I get to Monday night without having come up with anything new to say. But mostly, it will serve to re-train my brain to appreciate the inconsequentiality of all of…this. There can be just blogs. It doesn’t have to be particularly good or meaningful. It can just be—just quickly mining ice cores merely to see what’s there, even as it all melts away, from above and below.

1. NYT Opinion — Should We Cancel Aristotle? — In which a professor of philosophy wrangles with the apparently difficult question of whether or not philosophers should read Aristotle despite his PROBLEMATIC ethics, especially in regard to his HOT TAKES on slavery, the working class, and women.

The answer to the question posed in the headline is so self-evident to me that I have trouble imagining that it is posed as anything but a straw-man—but I also think that was sorta the point of the piece—not as an exercise begun in bad faith against an imaginary position no one is arguing, but as a way of pointing out that it is useful to engage with wrong things. Of course we shouldn’t stop reading Aristotle—we shouldn’t stop reading anything! Aristotle may not have had an ethics based in a belief in the fundamental shared dignity of all human individuals, or was perhaps building an ethics around his observations of a profoundly inequitable society. Either way, one wonders how vastly would his conclusions about our society today differ—in a world in which the bottom 50% of adults own one percent of global wealth, the top one percent own 40% of global wealth, and the top 10% own 85%, it’s not hard to imagine his takes on slavery might not evolve much, after all.

I do wonder if any of this larger discussion about speech is actually about speech at all—maybe there’s something about being online, using social media, that all but eliminates the idea of speech as something distinct from the person. (This would be a problem, to be clear.) Something else that struck me while reading the piece: there’s a lot of talk about how “nerd culture” has essentially taken over the wider pop culture conversation, and I think it extends beyond the Marvel and Star Wars movies making all that money. Social media has transformed our interests into our identities, in much the way children (and nerds) create entire identities around the things that they like. It can be incredibly important to a child of a certain age that BLUE is her favorite color, and that this preference is something that makes her who she is. Posting an article or video on Facebook is, more often than not, presented as not an object for disinterested engagement, but as a representation of the voice of the person posting. And any engagement with the content is seen as a confrontation—not with the content, but the person who posted it. The journalistic assurance in the Twitter bio so often seen, that “retweets do not = endorsement,” reveals a glaring fault in the system—that, barring the qualifier, people are always posting or speaking in terms of emotional or intellectual identity affirmation, and even when they think they’re not, they’re secretly revealing themselves by mistake.

This is a terrible way to do conversation! But then, what drew me to philosophy in the first place was (in part) probably the personal remove—the distance between people and their ideas, the notion that one could engage with thought experiments and even obviously morally bankrupt systems or ideas as a vehicle for growth and understanding of other, better possibilities. On social media, everything always seems so much more definitive than that, already decided—like all we ever needed to figure everything out really was an internet connection, after all.

2. AP: Pompeo says US should limit which human rights it defends — In which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, of all the goddamn people, tells us which human rights matter.

An almost reassuring thing about the people currently in power is that for all their bad ideas, they are also mostly morons. The easiest thing in the world right now should be to take a coherent stand against the lunatic excesses of the fringes, but Pompeo can’t even get around his thick meatskull to see his opening.

“America is fundamentally good and has much to offer the world because our founders recognized the existence of God-given unalienable rights and designed a durable system to protect them,” he said. “But these days I must say even saying America is fundamentally good has become controversial.”

Maybe that’s because if you have to say it, it might not actually be the case! And maybe—and not to harp on this again—if the top 10% of your country’s population owns 70% of the country’s wealth, people are going to be a bit skeptical about the absolute primacy of inalienable property rights! If property has accrued, and continues to accrue, in fewer and fewer hands over the course of many generations, and then grows of its own nearly magical reproductive power without the need for its owners’ labor, maybe something important is wrong.

Of course, he’s not precisely wrong that the list of “human rights,” as insisted on by various international agencies and politicians, has grown comically out of proportion with the real. I take particular issue with the claim that “health care is a human right,” as has been the formulation lately popular on the left. What does this mean?! Of course health care isn’t a human right! It’s a purely contingent privilege, based entirely on the accident of the time and place of your birth. Human rights are fundamental and timeless—if a human couldn’t rationally expect a “right” to something 500 years ago, then they shouldn’t expect it as a “human right” now, either. The list is incredibly short, as it should be—life, liberty, expression, association. Everything else is contingent, negotiable, and contractual, one way or another. That all Pompeo can do is bleat about property rights and religious freedom from atop the power structure reveals how ill-equipped he is to oppose those he believes to be wrong. He doesn’t have any idea what it is that makes Amercia good, “fundamentally” or otherwise, and that’s why he can’t articulate a coherent argument against those who would call his statement controversial.

3. I know it’s very old hat to dump on the New Yorker’s in house “satirist” Andy Borowitz, but holyfuckingshit how does this guy live with himself, putting out mother-in-law level humor like this?

No, I’m not going to provide a link. Fuck this nonsense. The only acceptable satire of the demented clown neoptism of the Trump administration is a never-ceasing live reproduction of The Human Centipede with lookalikes who never stop shitting down each other’s throats while the audience looks on, apparently horrified, but continuing nonetheless to eat their shit-and-piss-splattered popcorn and candy. Everything else is cuddly and lovable, like the above handjob.

4. WAPO: ‘What choice do we have?’: Portland’s ‘Wall of Moms’ faces off with federal officers at tense protests — In which white mothers use the power of their privilege to immediately be accused of centering themselves and silencing voices of color.

I wonder how many of these moms would be out there protecting the protests if they knew the gnarly underbelly of a not-insignificant portion of the movement—the anarchist element that wants to tear down all of the institutional frameworks and rebuild little community conclaves without banks and the evils of food distribution. Probably not as many! Most of us like our banks and iPhones and grocery stores full of nearly impossible abundance, after all.

But that’s not entirely fair—there’s plenty to be protesting about, and certainly plenty of reason to stand up against the federal agents coming in and arbitrarily pulling people off the streets. The total vacuum of morally authoritative power created by our lack of faith in our institutions sure does lead to some strange conflagrations of people on the streets, doesn’t it?

5. Wallace vs. Trump, may it live forever — In which we watch it! Watch it! Watch it again!

I still can’t get over how good a job Chris Wallace did in his interview with Trump last weekend, and I think I finally put my finger on why. It’s not that other journalists haven’t tried to hold the president to account in meaningful ways, it’s that other journalists have had far too much respect for the office, or for the importance of their own institutional role, to do so in a way that actually worked. Jim Acosta is too self-important to seem like anything but a stuffy scold when he’s being astonished or horrified by Trump. He’s playing precisely to the type that Trump wants to label him as. David Muir, Lester Holt, even Yamiche Alcindor—even when they’re undeniably right, their commitment to institutional normalcy leaves them completely exposed to Trump’s absurdist trick.

Though Wallace was in a suit and tie, he came across, through the entire interview, as someone who accosted Trump on the sidewalk. He moved just as fast as someone talking on the street might, never giving Trump the chance to focus his nonsense grievance attacks on one thing for very long. He showed deference to neither the office nor the man, no respect beyond superficially polite niceties—he gave Trump nothing that he didn’t deserve, because he knew that Trump would never extend him the same courtesy. Wallace—a widely respected journalist somewhere near the top of his industry’s game—laughed at the president through the 40-minute interview. He didn’t laugh with him, he didn’t laugh behind his back, back in the cool safety of the broadcast studio—he laughed at him, for 40 minutes.

Wallace is the first journalist to sit down with Trump and get it exactly right. Friendly, relentless, and utterly unimpressed. He sat down with our stupid naked little emperor, this lying, sweating, retreating clown, and he did exactly what any normal human should do when confronted by such a creature—he laughed right in his stupid face.